Legal

Privacy & cookie policy

Motoring Mini is an independent fan community for Mini Cooper owners. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by MINI or BMW Group. This page explains what we store, who else sees it, and how to change your mind.

How we work out whether to ask you

We only show the cookie dialog to visitors whose connection appears to be in the EU, the UK, or the EEA. Everyone else gets the same site without being interrupted, because the rules the dialog exists to satisfy do not reach them. If you have been shown this page and no dialog, that is why.

To make that judgement our server looks at the IP address of the request and works out the country it belongs to. Some specifics are worth stating plainly:

• Nothing is kept. The country is worked out per request, used to decide whether to show the dialog, and then discarded. It is not saved, not put in a cookie, and not attached to your account.
• We never ask your browser where you are. We do not request the location permission and never receive your coordinates. A country is all this decision needs, so a country is all we take.
• It is done on our own server. We classify addresses against a country database we hold, or use the country a CDN or proxy in front of the site has already determined.
• Why this needs no permission. Deciding whether a set of rules applies to a request is ordinary processing of a request we already receive, done on the basis of our legitimate interest in applying them correctly. Placing information on your device is what would require asking you first, and we do not do that.

It can also be wrong. A VPN or Tor makes your connection look like it comes from somewhere else, and we have no way to tell that it does. The rules also follow you rather than your location, so an EU visitor abroad is still covered and a visitor from elsewhere inside the EU is not. Neither case is something a country lookup can fix. If you would rather be asked regardless, use Cookie settings in the footer: it is available to every visitor, whatever country we think you are in, and a choice made there is remembered and honoured like any other.

Cookies this site sets itself

These are first-party cookies. They are not switched off, because the site cannot work without them, and they never leave our domain.

Third parties

In the EU, UK and EEA, nothing below loads unless you have agreed to the matching category, with one exception that cannot be gated: the sign-up spam check, described after the table. Outside those regions there is nothing to agree to, so it loads as normal and no dialog is shown. If you did decline, the ad spaces stay empty, video thumbnails are replaced with a local placeholder, and pressing play reopens the cookie prompt rather than contacting the provider.

• Google — AdSense

  Only if you agreed to it, or if you are outside the EU/UK

  Serves ads and sets its own cookies, including the NID and IDE/DSID cookies used to measure and personalise ads.

• Google — Fonts

  Only if you agreed to it, or if you are outside the EU/UK

  Serves the Material Symbols icon font from fonts.gstatic.com. Google records the request.

• Google — YouTube

  Only if you agreed to it, or if you are outside the EU/UK

  Serves video thumbnails from i.ytimg.com and, once you press play, the embedded player from youtube-nocookie.com.

• Vimeo

  Only if you agreed to it, or if you are outside the EU/UK

  Serves video thumbnails and, once you press play, the embedded player from player.vimeo.com.

• Google — Sign in with Google

  Only when you choose to sign in that way

  We receive your email address, display name and profile picture URL from Google. We never see your Google password.

• Cloudflare — Turnstile

  Only if you open the sign-up form, and it is not optional there

  Runs the spam check on the sign-up form, so accounts are not created by robots. The check runs on Cloudflare’s servers, which see the request IP as part of answering it. Nothing is sent to them until you open the form to create an account.

• Our email provider — SMTP relay

  Only if you ask us to email you a password reset link

  Delivers the password reset email to the address you type into the reset form, so it receives that address, your username, and a single-use link back to this site. The link contains a token that only works once and expires after an hour; the site stores a one-way hash of it, not the link itself. It is not used for marketing, and no other address is sent.

Note that on this site Necessary only and Deny all have the same effect, because media and advertising are the only optional categories we use. They are recorded as separate choices and will diverge if an optional category is added later.

The sign-up spam check is the exception to the gating rule above. It runs in Cloudflare’s servers rather than in your browser, so it needs a request to them, and a sign-up form that could not be submitted without it would not be a working sign-up form. It is not a cookie, it is not used to follow you around the site, and it is the only request these providers receive from someone who declined every optional category — and only if they then try to create an account. If you would rather not create an account, nothing here contacts them.

What else we hold about you

Beyond cookies, we store the following if you choose to give it to us:

• Account data — your email address, username, hashed password, and any bio, location or avatar you add under Settings.
• Password reset requests — if you use the reset form, a one-way hash of the reset link, the time it expires and the time it was used, held against your account for as long as the link could still have been valid. The link itself is only ever in the email we sent you. Changing your password deletes them, and requesting a new one replaces the last.
• What you post — reviews, ratings, forum threads and posts, events you create or RSVP to, and any photos you upload, including the location recorded against them.
• Chat messages — messages sent in the community chat, which members can read.
• Ad click counts — a first-party counter incremented when you click an advertisement. It records that the click happened, not who you are.
• Presence — while you are connected, your username is shared with other connected visitors so they can see who is online. Closing the tab ends this.

Staff can see and moderate content you post. Photos and the calendar are staff-only areas; events and their addresses are visible to members.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 you have the right to:

Access

Ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you.

Rectification

Ask us to correct anything that is wrong. You can edit most of your own profile under Settings.

Erasure

Ask us to delete your account and the data attached to it.

Restriction

Ask us to pause processing while a dispute is resolved.

Portability

Ask for your data in a machine-readable format.

Object

Object to processing you have not consented to, and to direct marketing.

Withdraw consent

Change or withdraw your cookie choices at any time, using the button below. It works exactly like the original choice did.

To exercise any of these, contact us and we will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your request you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Images hosted elsewhere

Editors may enter an external image URL when publishing an article or setting an avatar. Where that happens, the image is fetched from the site the URL points at and that host sees your IP address. Images uploaded to Motoring Mini are served from our own domain and do not.

Last reviewed when the cookie dialog was limited to EU, UK and EEA visitors.